Thanks for the wonderful offer, again, Doug. I’m not in a rush so I’ll wait and see if Litesmith get the international shipping up and running in the next few weeks. If not, I may well take you up on the offer.

I’ve got the 9″ Ruta Locura stakes and love them. They appear to now be made/sold by ZPacks. These LiteSmith stakes *look* to be somewhat more, shall we say “carefully engineered” but that does not mean they are a better stake. For instance the cap looks very similar to those on the Easton aluminum stakes which in my experience are unusually prone to failure.

Does anyone have experience with both the LiteSmith and RL/ZPacks stakes and care to compare?

We started shipping stakes this week so they are just beginning to get in the hands of users. What I can tell you is that we tested a group of these stakes in five different locations, each with hard compacted, but not rocky, ground. At each location, each stake was driven into the ground 10 times and pulled out 10 times. I used a typical hammer at 3 locations and a hand-sized rock at 2 locations. That’s 50 insertions and pullouts for each stake. They survived with only damage to the top of the stake head due to the rock pounding. I was sore for two days.

We’ve spent a lot of time developing the right manufacturing process so the tip and head will not come out. I think you’re going to like them.

I ordered 4 long & 4 short stakes on Tuesday — I was shocked when I stopped at my PO Box on Friday and there they were! :-)

Beautiful build quality — they are just lovely (can stakes be lovely? yes, yes they can). I tried them out for a quick overnight this weekend. Camped in a forested area around 7100 ft in northern NM. Ground was fairly soft due to freeze/thaw, lots of duff — I haven’t had much luck with ti shepherd stakes in those conditions. These performed very well, easy in, easy out. Held well on a windless night.

I look forward to trying them out in other conditions. So far I’m very pleased.

This forum is why I maintain membership. Every once in a while little known gems like this come along. I bought a couple stakes and recently got them in the mail and am very impressed. I even bought some mini Chapstick as well.

Peter – I was bummed when I went to your site earlier this year to try and order a few more of the carbon fiber stakes and found them NLA. I managed to pick up 8 of the regular length ones and have used them a lot in the last year and always worked great. I’m curious as to why you dropped them from the line as well.

Sales were great, there was a lot of interest. There were two reasons we stopped making them. We were a new company at the time and we did have a few field failures and I was worried about damaging our reputation. Social media makes word travel fast, good or bad. The second reason, and really the primary reason, is they are difficult to build, our margins were low, and we were spending a lot of our resources on building them. I decided it would be better to focus our time on other things.

The Litesmith stakes looked really nice…I probably would have tried them if any of my 9″ Ruta Locura CF stakes failed, but they haven’t :) The ZPacks stakes look nearly identical to the RL stakes, either one would be a good choice if you need that style of stake. I prefer the longer length that RL offers.

No. Not lame. My recollection was that someone purchased these and experienced failures. I had purchased a set and weeks before a planned 10 day Sierra trip, I experimented with them over a couple of weekends….and sure enough the heads began separating from the shafts.

Litesmith pulled the product, offered a full refund……. they did all of the right things. I appreciated the standup manner in which they handled the situation. Lame would have been continuing to sell a defective product.

As a result, I still frequent their site and continue to buy their goodies. A good company, super fast shipping. Nice folks. Recommended.